Illegitimate Child Loses Will Fight : Jurisprudence: The woman was fathered out of wedlock 32 years ago by Ross W. Cortese, the late multimillionaire founder of Leisure World.

SANTA ANA — An Orange County Superior Court judge ruled Friday that Hillary Jade Pedersen is not entitled legally to share in the multimillion-dollar estate of her father, the late Leisure World founder Ross W. Cortese, who fathered the woman out of wedlock 32 years ago.

“I think society cannot handle the fact that illegitimate children have rights too,” Pedersen said outside the courtroom after the judge ruled that her case had no basis for going to trial.

Pedersen has been arguing for the past year in probate court that she was an “omitted heir” who should have been included in Cortese’s 1987 will. Cortese, who died in 1991, stipulated that his inheritance go only to his first wife, Alona, second wife, Eloise, and daughter Heidi.

In his will, Cortese specifically noted that he had “no other living or deceased children” other than Heidi Cortese. Pedersen, 32, is the daughter of Cortese and Ruth Elaine Hall, his company’s longtime decorator with whom he had an affair in the 1960s.

Julee Robinson, the commissioner who heard the case, said that Pedersen would have been considered an “omitted heir” only if she had been born after the will was drafted or if it was proven that Cortese mistakenly believed Pedersen was dead or hadn’t been born.

“We can’t have every child not mentioned in a will coming forward to partake” in an estate, Robinson said.

In court documents, Pedersen’s attorneys admitted that Cortese knew she was alive at the time the will was drafted. But in court Friday, attorney Kevin R. McLean sought to retract the statement, saying it was a typographical error. He said he would file a motion for a new hearing based on the mistake.

“The face of the will says that (Cortese) only has one daughter so I would question whether he knew she was alive on the date the will was written,” McLean said.

McLean added that Cortese may have mistakenly believed that out-of-wedlock children were not entitled to partake of a will, which at one time was the law.

During the one-hour hearing, Pedersen and her husband, Paul, who live in Huntington Beach, sat on one side of the courtroom and held hands during the proceedings. At the other end, Heidi Cortese, who lives in San Francisco, sat taking notes. When the hearing was over, Cortese and her attorney rode off in a chauffeured Lincoln Town Car. The Pedersens departed in their Nissan Sentra.

McLean said the fight is not over.

“We knew that we’d be in litigation for quite some time over this,” said McLean, who estimates that Cortese’s assets are worth between $300 million and $500 million.

An inventory of the estate in court papers shows it be worth about $5,000, including a rare coin collection, several hundred shares of stock and savings bonds.

Theodore I. Wallace, the attorney for the estate’s executor, William V. March, said that just before his death, Cortese transferred the bulk of his worth into several trusts that are no longer part of the estate.

Wallace would not say what the trusts are worth, but said the total is “substantially less than $300 million.”

In court on Friday, Wallace said it would have been impossible to prove that Cortese believed his daughter to be dead since he gave her gifts and money throughout her life. Court documents show that Cortese gave her a car as a wedding gift as recently as 1985.

“He states in his will that he had one daughter,” Wallace said. “Why he wouldn’t refer to her is up to him to decide. But you can’t draw the inference that he didn’t know she was alive.”

Cortese was responsible for building about 24,000 retirement units in Laguna Hills, Seal Beach and four other states. A high school dropout, he began his empire by restoring run-down property to sell at a profit and eventually turned to construction, building the highly popular retirement villages that continued to sell briskly after his death.

For Pedersen, “life goes on” with her husband and three children--ages 8, 3 1/2 and 1.

“This was never about money,” she said. “It was about a mistake made in a will and the fact that my father did have two children, not one. I still feel very warmly about my father. I look identical to him and I’ve given him his only grandchildren.”